The loss of 19 firefighters in Arizona is sending a chill through the firefighting community in the Northwest. Fire season is about to begin here -- ushered in by a heat wave sweeping the region.

Word spread fast among wildland firefighters in the Northwest. “We are saddened but [must] honor our fallen by continuing with the job at hand,” wrote the hotshot crew out of Union, Ore., on Facebook.

“This is going to be on the minds of every firefighter in America,” says John Maclean is the author of a book about the 2001 Thritymile Fire that killed four firefighters in north-central Washington. He says even as the job goes on, it will be hard for fire managers in the Northwest not to ask themselves certain questions.

“You know, ‘What about committing crews when conditions are as extreme as they are now? Is this something we should take into account?’ … These are difficult judgment calls.”

The Northwest has seen several tragedies in recent years, though safety rules have made deaths from fire itself relatively rare. Last August, 20-year-old wildland firefighter Anne Veseth was killed in Idaho by a falling tree. In 2008, nine firefighters from Grayback Forestry, based in Merlin, Ore., died in a helicopter crash in northern California.

This week, federal forecasters issued an update to their fire outlook maps. For July, parts of southwest Idaho and all but the very northwest tip of Oregon are highlighted in red.

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Say goodbye to the rain. The Northwest and parts of Canada are about to see an abrupt shift from unseasonably cool weather to record-breaking temperatures, in some areas. Triple-digit highs are expected to settle over the region for the next week.

According to federal forecasters, it's going to be a tough wildfire season in the West. But here in the Northwest, it's been hard to see that prediction through all the rain.

Where you are in Idaho will determine your wildfire risk this summer. Fire officials gave their predictions Tuesday on what fire seasons will be like around the state. If you’re in southern Idaho you shouldn’t see the type of catastrophic wildfires we had last year.

Several forest fires are already burning in Western Washington and crews are mopping up a big one in central Oregon. There were also two grass fires that burned near Middleton, Idaho just west of Boise, this past weekend.

Dry winds and above average temperatures predicted this summer and fall, have fire managers preparing for an earlier than usual season.